章節 87: 87. Chapter 87
Castle laughs as he picks the knots out of her hair; she leans back against his raised knees and reads the rest of the scene he wrote when she was mad at him. The place is quiet finally; the kids got an early start on bedtime, but it's worth it. He's glad to have some time alone with Kate, the two of them just sharing the bed, sharing the day.
This is what he always wanted, even from the beginning. The chance to make a world with her.
"What on earth did Ella do to your hair?" he mutters, using his thumb nail to work the tangles free.
"I don't know. Allie was showing her how to braid."
"Looks like she could be a sailor. These are good knots."
Kate laughs and scrolls down the document a little ways, still entranced by the story. "Silver lining, huh?"
"Always," he murmurs, pausing to read over her shoulder. She fixes a subject-verb agreement issue, takes the extra 'the' out of a sentence, even while she reads. He idly works at the knots in her hair, paying more attention to Kate's unconscious editing.
She's never asked to edit, never asked to read as he goes along. There was one book that he made her read after the first draft was complete, but that was because it dealt with some issues that were, essentially, personal. He wanted to make sure she would be okay with the world reading about the things they'd gone through.
But this is different. He feels like she's half writing it with him. Dashiell is half her; Felix should be too. At least, it seems right, natural, in a way that her reading his Nikki Heat manuscripts never did.
Still, if she asks to read Nikki, he'll gladly let her.
"Hm, I like this. This is definitely us," she says, and he can hear the smile even if he can't see it.
"Well, yes, that was nearly word for word-"
"Not just that. But it's how we parent. You really think Nikki and Rook will parent this way too?"
He pauses, his palm to the back of her skull, knots in her hair forgotten. "I hadn't thought of it like that."
She nudges his hand with her head to get him going again. "Nikki - she never struck me as being all that kid-friendly."
He puffs out a laugh and scratches her scalp before dropping his hand. "Kate, honey, I say this in all love. But neither did you."
She twists against his raised knees, her ribs against his shins, takes a long look at him. "I'm not kid-friendly?"
"You are now. But back then? When I first started Nikki Heat? Those first few cases, kid-friendly isn't exactly how I pictured you. You were - dangerous and seductive and wild as a polecat."
"A polecat?"
"Let me rephrase that," he hedges, wincing when she pinches his skin. "Still are wild as a polecat. Ouch."
Kate tugs on his leg hair, props her chin on his knees, settles his laptop on the bed. The knots on one side of her head make her hair curl strangely, like a nest of little snakes. Also probably not a good allusion to make at the moment.
"Those first few cases were when I wrote the character sketch. Kids just weren't on Nikki's horizon. She's compassionate, and she knows how to talk to victims' families. And that's you. It's not that you didn't like kids or put them off or anything. Just that you never - it never seemed part of the plan."
And there's truth in that, not just because she has a job that encompasses all of her, but even when she did accidentally get pregnant, it wasn't exactly the best moment of their lives.
When he looks at her, there is only quiet acceptance of that in her face. Then she narrows her eyes and pulls his leg hair again. "So. What exactly is a polecat?" She rolls her eyes at his pout, but presses her lips to his kneecap in a kind of apology.
"A fitchew."
"A what?"
"It's in the weasel family."
She slaps the side of his leg. "You calling me a weasel?"
"Ooh, no. It's one of those terms my Mother likes to throw around. Local color. I think it's Southern. But it means skunk actually."
"A skunk is not any better, Castle."
He grins. "It just means . . .your hackles were always raised. Like a skunk sprays that awful odor when it's scared."
"So either you thought I was scared? Or you thought I stank."
"I - uh - seem to be digging a hole here. Lend me a hand out."
She turns and presses her breasts against his knees, lifts a little to offer her mouth. Not a hand out, but he'll take a kiss. Castle leans away from the headboard and captures her lips, stroking his tongue past the permeable barrier of her mouth, darting inside.
She hums and he drops his legs open, catches her before she can fall, gathers her against his chest. He's careful to avoid the laptop, since it does have the only copy of Felix at the moment, but Kate tucks her feet up and curls into him, kissing him slowly, unhurried. Mm, the best kind.
Castle strokes his palms down her arms, slides across her sides, and then up her back, bringing her shirt-
"Ah, ah, ow. Castle." She arches away from his hands and he stills, remembers the scratches down her back.
"Sorry," he murmurs, cradling the back of her head, whispering into her ear. He slowly lifts her shirt to look, wincing at the angry lines running parallel to her spine. "This looks worse than this morning."
"The salt from the ocean. And chlorine from the pool. And then my shirt keeps rubbing it."
"What happened to the band-aids?"
"They kept getting caught and coming off, so I just yanked them all."
"Let me put some anti-bacterial ointment on this, Kate." He lifts her shirt to her shoulders, nudges to get her to lift her arms.
She does, shivers in the air conditioning, and presses her chest to his to keep warm. He laughs softly, curls his hand at her shoulder.
"I gotta get up to get it. Lie down in bed. Here, lie down where the laptop was - it'll be all heated up."
She laughs back at him, shifts the laptop and presses down under the covers. Castle gets up quickly and heads for the bathroom and the neosporin. It takes him a minute to find it, and when he gets back, she's propped up on her elbows with the laptop open again. Her head turns to look at him.
"Email came in from Black Pawn. It's marked urgent."
"What did it say?"
She gives him a look. "I didn't read it."
"You didn't?"
She rolls her eyes. "After today? Hell no."
"You can read my emails, Kate," he laughs at her, kneeling down on the bed over her and untwisting the cap. "You can read the books. You can read whatever you want-"
"It's your stuff. Your private emails." She shrugs at him and pushes the screen of the laptop his direction.
"You know I don't care. Here, open up the email for me while I do this." He dabs antibiotic cream over the nastiest looking scratch, trying to go lightly.
She hisses and hunches her shoulders, but she opens his email; he reads over her bare shoulder, eyes darting back and forth between the message and what he's doing. She smears a long path up the worst of it, then dabs as the other places that have already started to scab over. Then his eyes go back to the last of that email.
And then he stops, reads it again.
"Castle, what does this mean?"
"Holy shit. I didn't think they'd send me a proposal."
"Is this for more books? Because that is a serious amount of money."
"No. Actually. Uh." He glances down at her bare back, the line of scratches, bruises forming like wings at her shoulder blades. "Wow. Um. I kind of did the same thing you did."
"What? What did I do?"
"Well. I'm not sure - I mean, when I started this, I was still just working at home, right?"
"What is this?" she says, and twists to look at him, a hand propping her head up. He blinks and puts the cream down, slides off her to sit beside her instead.
"You know. It's really hard to have a conversation with you when you're topless, Kate."
She laughs and sits up, then reaches towards the floor for her tshirt. Castle grabs her by the wrist to keep her from falling off the bed, watching in fascination as she moves, perfect tension and balance, her muscles strong, her body strong. Incredible.
Incredibly distracting.
When she shrugs the shirt back over her head, he blinks and has to take a moment.
"So. What is this about? Am I going to be angry with you?"
He runs a hand down his face. "No? No. Shouldn't be. But I - after they did this stuff with Felix? I ran into a lot of problems. They don't have a marketing department big enough for YA lit, they're limited on vision too, so instead of writing, I'm making all these decisions about cover art and type face and having to research YA markets."
"Who is they?"
"Black Pawn. The publisher. And I'm not looking to ditch them; they've been too good to me. They're perfect for Nikki."
She gives him a smile, leans in to brush her fingers over his knee, mirroring his position by sitting cross-legged on the bed as well.
He takes her hand, smooths out her palm with his thumb. "I offered to buy Black Pawn."
She blinks at him, her mouth drops.
"Yeah. Yeah, I didn't expect them to send me a counter-offer. I expected them to laugh."
She closes her mouth, stares at him. "So. What are you going to do?"
"Talk it over with you," he says, lifting an eyebrow and giving her a smile.
She gives a faint smile back. "What would it mean? If you owned Black Pawn?"
"I'd throw a lot of money into their marketing department, mostly because of the real lack of resources and vision for Felix."
She nods at that. Hopeful, right?
"But - uh - I also had this idea? That maybe I could hire you."
She laughs, but sobers quickly when he doesn't laugh with her. "Hire me for what?"
"Consulting. It would be - the reverse. You'd consult on my job," he says, grinning at her, feeling some of that initial enthusiasm flare up again. "Black Pawn represents an inordinate number of police procedural and crime novelists. You're a cop, a detective, and I'd say seventy-five percent of those novelists need some serious help with the facts."
"Castle."
"They come to me. You know I get new authors asking me to check their facts. I'm not the one they should be asking. It's you. You should get these questions. Because half the time I just ask you anyway."
"You want to hire me. Wait. You want to buy Black Pawn." She says it softly, as if she's still stunned by the idea.
"I want to buy it, yes. I do. And - and yeah, I want you to be a consultant. And Esposito and Ryan too. Share the load, share the rewards. It would do a world of good for these new authors. And boost the quality of stuff Black Pawn publishes. Then I'd have the capital to rework their marketing, as well as-"
"You've really thought about this."
"You're not mad?"
"No. Not mad. Surprised. You get mad at me when I do this, but - Castle - I do this to you so much because this is how I work best. Plan it out, think it through, then present the complete package to you for your approval. No point coming to you with half-baked theories."
"But I like half-baked theories. I like coming up with all of it together."
She sighs, gives him a sad smile. Her fingers untangle from his and she brushes the hair back from his forehead. "I like coming up with it together, too."
He swallows back a sudden urge to crush her in his arms, hug her so tight, but he won't because her back is messed up, and it's his fault anyway. Instead he leans into her touch and closes his eyes.
"Castle," she murmurs.
"Mm."
"You wanna tell me more about this?"
"That's mostly it. I could buy Black Pawn."
"What about-" She stops, sounds hesitant, so he opens his eyes. She's biting her bottom lip.
"What about . . .?" he prompts.
"Working with me?"
"Yeah, well, that'll just be as it comes. I mean, you could do that through email. And I promise to treat them better than Alex Conrad if you have to do a face-to-face. I'm-"
She's shaking her head, smiling at him like she knows a secret. "No, not that end. I mean, with me. My job."
"Oh. Oh, right. Coming back to the 12th." He stares at her for a moment. "I can still do that."
Her eyes sharpen, but he hurries on.
"No, seriously, I can. Owning Black Pawn would be a lot of delegation, really. I'm gonna hire people to get it in shape. I can still be at the precinct for a couple days a week."
She takes a breath, meets his eyes again. "I'm - that was selfish. I'm sorry. Do you want to do this? Buy Black Pawn?"
He takes a moment, really thinks about what it means, the full implications of it. "Yes."
"Then you should."
He stares at her, his heart pounding.
Kate lifts to her knees and wraps her arms around his neck. When she speaks, her voice is quiet but it doesn't doubt, doesn't waver.
"You should buy it, Castle."
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